Listen to the Rain

There are many ways to be observant:( Two Jews, three opinions )

But the real big news is that...I moved! I bought a condo!

( I own a home! )

Thursday I went back to work--originally I had taken it off, but later changed my mind--and I met ed.mcnamara13 and takei.tsubasa for lunch at Gyūkaku! I had last seen them back in May, when they were here to look around before takei.tsubasa started her Chicago job. Well, now it's starting, and ed.mcnamara13 was here helping her move. Again, ed.mcnamara13 and I did most of the talking, and he offered to give me a bunch of light novels that someone gave him and that he'd owned for years without having read, so I'll get more Japanese practice! We also all commiserated over how banal and saccharine 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ, the book I'm reading with my Japanese tutor, is. takei.tsubasa didn't talk a lot, but I noticed she kept glancing at the menu. And Gyūkaku is delicious, so I get that. I could only stay an hour before I had to run back to work, but ed.mcnamara13 said he'd be by more often since takei.tsubasa lives here now, so I'm looking forward to it!

After work I got a haircut and then joined aaron.hosek at First Slice Pie for dinner! He was in Europe for the past couple weeks on a last pre-school-year vacation, and he's been absorbed by Final Fantasy XIV for much of the summer, so it was great to see him. I asked him about his trip and returned the Guy Gavriel Kay parallel history books I borrowed from him (The Lions of Al-Rassan, etc.) as well as The Lies of Locke Lamora, I told him about moving, he told me about his new apartment and the battle of wills with his landlord over getting it painted, and I got to say longer because I didn't have therapy. Though not too long, with all the unpacking I had to do. We realized that we're now literally for blocks from each other, so we have no reason not to hang out more often.

When I went home, the RAM testing I had run on my computer came back clean. It blue-screened after the RCN guy left and threw a ton of errors on the first test, but slots 2 and 4 came back clean and when I put 1 and 3 back in, the whole thing came back clean. Hopefully it was just a fluke! We treated it extremely gently during moving to make sure that this didn't happen, and yet...

As my father says, the more you know about computers, the more amazed you are that they ever work.

Now I'm at work for a half-day, and then I'm meeting lisekatevans and luke.beasley.262 so we can take a trip up to lisekatevans's parents' lake house at Sand Lake in Michigan! She said the forecast predicts night temperatures in the low 10°s C, so I cracked open a box last night and found my long cardigan there on the first try! That meant I could hang up some coats as well as put some boxes on the shelves, so I'm slowly settling into my new home. I even hung some pictures on the walls where the previous owner/renter hadn't removed the hooks!

I'm really looking forward to a nice vacation weekend. I'm not exhausted anymore, but I'm definitely still tired. A weekend at a lake house with chilly nights and warm bonfires is just what the doctor ordered.